Put Your WordPress Site on Autopilot Now to Save Time And Boost Success
When it comes to running a successful business, marketing automation is the key.
After all, you can drive more traffic, generate more leads, and make more money when you automate processes you do on a regular basis.
“And think about all the time you’ll save”.
If you’re using the WordPress content management system (CMS), you’re already ahead of the game if you want to start automating your marketing efforts.
There are thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins available to help with website security, web design, and functionality.
And yes, there are plenty on the market designed to help you with marketing automation too.
If you’re looking for ways to put your website on autopilot to save time and grow your business, check out these helpful WordPress plugins and tools designed to help you do just that.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to any software or tool that automates your marketing efforts.
It helps to perform repetitive tasks automatically and streamline your marketing tasks so you can be more productive in other areas of your business.
Some of the key tasks marketing automation software aims to handle for you include:
- Email marketing campaigns
- Social media posts
- Content marketing
- Online advertising
Sounds good right?
If you want to save yourself time when it comes to these very necessary, though very repetitive tasks, be sure to check out these top WordPress plugins and tools.
Marketing Automation for Your WordPress Website
1. Stop Comment Spam
Comment spam is going to be something you’ll battle forever. However, filtering through the spam on your WordPress website manually can be a thing of the past if you want it to be.
The best option you have for automatically blocking, filtering, and tagging comment spam on your WordPress website is Akismet.
It automatically checks all comments on your site and filters out the ones that look like spam.
It even discards all comments that are definitely spammy, so you don’t have to review them and delete them yourself.
If you’re looking for other anti-spam solutions, because there are plenty of good ones out there, take a look Antispam Bee and Anti-spam.
They’re both great for automating the tedious process of removing spam from your website.
2. Social Media Auto Sharing
A big part of your overall marketing strategy is going to involve social media (or at least it should!).
However, logging into each social media platform and uploading newly published content can be a pain and a major time suck.
If you want a simple, free plugin solution for sharing blog posts on the major social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, use Social Media Auto Publish.
With it, you can automate processes like:
- Publishing to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, complete with images
- Attaching posts or share links to Facebook
- Filtering items to automatically share based on post type or category
- Customizing message formats and actual messages
The great thing about Social Media Auto Publish is that it’s free. That said, the feature set is kind of slim.
If you’re looking for a more robust social media auto-sharing solution, check these tools out:
- Blog2Social. This premium solution lets you connect WordPress to all of your social media accounts, auto-post on all the platforms, schedule posts to share at a later date, and even re-post old content that your target audience loved.
- CoSchedule. Though much more than just a social media automation solution, CoSchedule lets you automatically post social media campaigns, share messages during times of higher engagement, and schedule posts in bulk to share across multiple networks.
Using feature-packed tools like these give you more automation opportunities and streamline your social media marketing efforts.
3. Get More Leads
Lead generation is something all WordPress website owners should be doing.
Whether you’re looking to build a bigger following or make more sales, generating leads that will turn into conversions is the only way to grow.
Luckily, OptinMonster is available for all your lead generation needs, especially when it comes to marketing automation.
Since OptinMonster is packed full of helpful features that help you get more done without actually doing more, we’ll just take a look at some of its key features:
- Use the built-in drag & drop builder to create beautiful forms that trigger based on site visitor behavior, so you target the right people at the right time
- Create any form you can think of – popups, slide-ins, floating bar, inline forms, fullscreen welcome mats, sidebar forms, content lockers, and even countdown timers – to market your best content and promotions
- Target leads using things like location, cookies, devices, and page sections to grab people’s attention and get them to convert
- Get real-time analytics with actionable insights so you can make improvements
And lastly, automatically build a bigger email list so you can continue your marketing automation efforts using the email service provider of your choice.
After all, OptinMonster integrates with popular email services like MailChimp, AWeber, MailPoet, Constant Contact, Drip, and many more.
4. Organize, Increase Sales, and Save Time
All of these things – organization, increasing sales, and saving time – sound great right?
Well, you can achieve all three using the leading sales and marketing software Infusionsoft.
And if you’re a WordPress blogger, you can use this software to create marketing campaigns and sales funnels, as well as develop an email marketing strategy to fit your needs.
Again, this solution is full of much-needed features to put you ahead of the competition, but when it comes to marketing automation, you can expect things like:
- Ready-made campaign templates for building landing pages, drafting email campaigns, and more
- Integration with your CRM where lead information is, autoresponder emails can be sent out, and all communication is organized and easy to reference
- Analytics reports with email open rates, CTR, and conversions, landing page and web form performance, and overall campaign results
- Google AdWords and Adsense management so your ads make you the most money possible
With Infusionsoft, the things that need to be done on a regular basis are done for you, the things you need to handle manually are made easier to do, and the data you need to access is made readily available.
Because of this, you’re able to attract more leads, convert more customers, and even automate things like billing and payment, all from one convenient platform.
5. Pre-Schedule Posts
Publishing consistent blog content for site visitors to read is one of the most important things you can do for your website’s success.
In fact, valuable content helps your SEO efforts, search rankings, and the amount of organic traffic that finds its way to your website.
If you really want to get on top of content marketing and start automating tasks to make your life a lot easier, use the free Editorial Calendar plugin.
With Editorial Calendar, you can do the following:
- Easily schedule posts to be published ahead of time – and automatically
- See a calendar overview of your content schedule and fill in the gaps where needed
- Drag & drop posts to make changes on your calendar
- Manage drafts within the plugin’s interface
- See the status of all posts
- Manage posts for multiple authors
- Quickedit post titles, content, and publish times
Organizing your content calendar ahead of time saves you the hassle of having to come up with new ideas every week and scramble to draft and publish posts.
Final Thoughts
Keep in mind this is by no means a comprehensive list of marketing automation tools and plugins you can use for your WordPress site. However, it’s a good start.
In fact, we’ve touched on email marketing, online advertising, content marketing, and social media, all of which lie at the core of your overall marketing strategies.
If you want to set your WordPress website on autopilot and save some serious time in the long run, take the time to find the plugins and tools that will work best for your website’s needs and set them up right now.
Just make sure you monitor your site’s speed and performance while you do this, so you don’t sacrifice the user experience in your quest for automation.
And if you do notice your site beginning to lag behind, look into using a CDN for reducing latency and speeding your website back up.
So, what are waiting for? Get started with marketing automation today so you can pull ahead of the competition and stay there.